Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) (70 page)

And now I
am
an old woman, who once was a young woman who went farther than she’d ever dreamed, and I find no comfort at all.

I’d trade these memories for a head full of regret in half a heartbeat.

In a public-pay report on the Piros discovery released a couple of months after my departure from Europa for the agency’s natsci compound near Tharsis, neofuturist Clarke Haley Hernandez wrote, “At long last, humanity is moving from the failures and missteps of our eons-old childhood, and all Heaven lies before us, with all its promises made manifest at last. We will finally shake free the decaying nursery-prison of the planet that birthed us and, in a moment more, sail clear.”

Reading back over a conceited piece of smeg like that, I almost feel better about
Piros piros
.

Of course, the humanity which Hernandez invited to flee its smothering cradle was not without dissenters. In an address from Vatican City, Pope Pius XIV quoted Anaximenes, who is said to have asked Pythagoras, “To what purpose should I trouble myself in searching out the secrets of the stars, having death or slavery continually before my eyes?” 

It’s time to feed the cats again.

“Why is she naked?” Peter Connor asked, pointing at Umachandra, and Joakim only shrugged and scratched at his beard. Peter had a beard too, but he’d always had a beard, as long I’d known him. He was the only one of us who’d done most of his work on Earth. After a postdoc at Johns Hopkins, he’d taken a job at the Carnegie and had done a lot with Tertiary mammals in places like Utah and Wyoming and Mexico, collecting samples for biomolecular studies and DNA extraction. Then Carnegie sent him away to Mars, and Peter made a name for himself working the Isidis Basin. All those years in the field had left their mark on his face and hands, and he could have easily been mistaken for a man ten or fifteen years his senior. Sometimes, I fancied that Peter Connor looked the way all paleontologists had looked, once upon a time.

He was dressed almost the same as Joakim, the same blue ANSA jumpsuit, but was also wearing gloves and a synthwool cap pulled down tight over his curly blond hair.

“You
have
noticed that she’s naked?”

“Why don’t you ask
her
?” I muttered, realizing that I was getting a headache and wondering if I had the energy to walk all the way back down to medbay. I decided to let it hurt a while. I might get lucky and find clarity buried somewhere in the pain.

“I was preoccupied,” Umachandra said irritably, still staring at the screen on the wall. “I needed to talk with Magellan as soon as the mechs were done, and I didn’t think to dress first. Does it matter?”

“Hey, I was only asking. I thought I might be missing something.”

“I was preoccupied,” she said again, not taking her eyes off Gliese 876. “If it makes you uncomfortable – ”

“Not in the least,” Peter replied, and sat down across the table from Joakim and me. He smiled and then winked at Joakim. The red and grey 712 buzzed over to serve him coffee and biscuits that he completely ignored. “But you’ve gotta be freezing your tits off, lady. It’s a fucking icebox in here.”

“I’m warm enough,” she told him, her skin rippling with burgundy light to betray her annoyance, and suddenly I wanted to slap her. Perhaps it was the headache, the dull throb behind my eyes making me anxious, making me worry that the droids might have missed something. But I wanted to slap her and tell her to go to her quarters and put some goddamn clothes on, that maybe the rest of us didn’t want to see her naked. Even after stasis, Umachandra Murdin looked strong and healthy, but her parents’ genetic abuse had left its telltale scars on her body, deformities that would have been hard enough to face without the headache and a coma hangover. The twisted, uneven mass of flesh just above the base of her spine, big around as my wrist and sprouting from her thoracolumbar fascia like a tangle of unfinished tentacles. Or the ugly patches of jet-black ganoid scales dappling her shoulders. Or the dozens of perfectly-formed suction cups scattered across the backs of her legs like some strange rash or malignancy. Joakim once said to me, not long after we were moved from Texas to the Cape Canaveral compound, that he didn’t see the point of traveling almost ninety trillion miles just to find aliens when we had Umachandra right there on Earth.

“Clean bills of health all round?” Peter asked, and I nodded, and Joakim nodded, too. Umachandra didn’t say anything. “Then I propose a toast,” and Peter lifted his cup. “To us, because we aren’t dead.”

“Not yet,” Joakim added and half-heartedly clunked his mug against Peter’s. “Magellan says things ain’t so daisy on
Gilgamesh
. In a few days, we might be docking with a ghost ship.”

“He’s exaggerating,” I said.

Joakim glared at me a moment and then told Peter everything we knew, or thought we knew, which really wasn’t all that much: Welles’ missing team, the expanded perimeter, the unsuccessful suicide attempts by Jack Baird and Anastazja Osmolska, the possibility that the droids were all that were holding the ship together. 

“Well, then, there you go,” Peter said when Joakim was done. He laughed grimly and put his feet up on the table. “And what did Magellan have to say about all this?”

“We’re on approach,” Umachandra said. “They have us locked.”

“I think I want to go back to sleep now, please,” Peter mumbled and sipped at his coffee.

“Look, guy. We all knew from the get-go how risky this mission would be,” Joakim said, trying to sound composed, trying to sound stoic. “Whatever’s happening on
Gilgamesh
, all we can do right now is wait and see. Maybe it’s not as bad as Magellan’s making it out to be. Anyway, regardless, there’s no point panicking.”

“Magellan said the situation is under control,” Umachandra said, glancing at us over her left shoulder. I could see by her flickering skin that she was a lot more concerned than she was willing to admit. “We have to trust her. She’s gotten us this far.”

“Umachandra, I don’t think anyone’s saying that the problem’s with Magellan,” Peter said and set his coffee cup down. “I think it’s the rendezvous we have to worry about. Who knows what sort of shape the
Gilgamesh
’s mainframe is in by now? Osmolska was their chief AI tech.”

“Magellan says it’s working fine.”

“Has she scanned for resets? Is there any chance Osmolska might have set up a doppelgänger? Does Magellan have access to the shell?”

“She’s working on it,” Umachandra Murdin replied, and turned back to the screen.

“She’d better work fast. We only have ten days – ”

“Nine,” Joakim corrected. “We only have nine days, Peter.”

“Two hundred and eight hours,” Umachandra said and touched the screen again. The sound of her fingertips brushing plasma made me think of meat frying.

Peter Connor shot her an exasperated glare, then leaned forward and picked up one of his biscuits, but set it right back down again. “Osmolska could have done a lot of damage, Joakim. You know that.” 

“Of course I know that, Peter. But there’s nothing we can do, is there? We listen to Magellan. We wait and see and hope that – ”

“I’m getting a headache,” I cut in. “I think I’m going back down to the mb to take something for it,” and I stood up too quickly, bumping my knee hard against the table. Coffee sloshed from our cups, and the tabletop absorbed it immediately. Joakim asked if I wanted him to walk me to the lift, and I said no. Peter said he was sure it was nothing serious. And Umachandra watched the red dwarf, like a cobra watching its fakir, and said nothing at all.

I think I’m going to skip some things here. What Joakim said to me and what I said to him after he followed me out into the corridor on my way to medbay. The eight days of physical and mental therapy preparing us for the rigors of Piros. The violent argument that Peter and Umachandra had over nothing much at all the day before we docked. My headache that refused to get better and which the mechs could find no cause for. I’m sure all these things are important, in their own way, maybe even more important than things I’ve written down already. They are all pieces of the puzzle, but the first of my three ballpoints is beginning to run dry, and I’m determined to finish telling this story the way that I started it. 

What I will say is that I was unaccustomed to fear, most especially to a fear of the unknown. Even as a child, I was an eager explorer, always wandering as far, or considerably farther, than my parents allowed, and thoughts of my physical safety rarely crossed my mind. At university, I did field work in the Sahara, Antarctica, and the Australian outback. I’d once spent two weeks as the unwilling “guest” of a group of Sudanese rebels, but returned at once to my work in Bahr El Ghazal when the government coughed up the ransom money that was being asked for my safe return. I’d trained on Mars and spent more than a year working Europa-Herschel. I’d been part of one of the first teams to set foot on Titan. Before the
Montelius
left for Piros, I’d genuinely believed that I was accustomed to isolation, on earth and in space, to life in remote, uninhabited places, to the demands and stress of living in extremely hostile environments, and to getting along with my colleagues. By the cold red light of Gliese 876, I realized that all of my treasured confidence was only arrogance and ignorance. Nothing could have prepared me, or the others, for that mission. Nothing could have ever made me, or anyone else, strong enough.

Get on with it, already.

On December 17th, 2252, six days after we were awakened, at exactly 1800 GMT, we were met by an unmanned escort probe from the
Gilgamesh
. We’d already passed by the outermost planets in the system – rocky, barren Cronos wrapped in its caul of methane, ethane, and carbon-monoxide ice, only a little larger than Pluto; a wide asteroid belt that was all that remained of a long-lost Earth-sized planet, destroyed in some ancient cataclysm; and the gas giant Procris – and we were still better than twenty-five million kilometers from Piros.

I sat with Joakim on the observation deck and watched the two tireless droids that had piloted the
Monty
those last seven and a half ship-years, as they spoke with the probe in their chattery machine languages. Minor course adjustments were made, and the final stage of our deceleration began as the forward thrusters fired three quick bursts, and the droids shut down the hydrogen scoop. For a moment, the ship shuddered around us alarmingly, and my stomach lurched. But then the turbulence passed.

“Damn,” Joakim said, “I think I might have dropped a kidney back there.”

“What do you really think we’re going to find?” I asked him, letting my body relax again after the jolt. The somaform padding of my chair molded itself about me and radiated a gentle, reassuring warmth. I didn’t look at him, watched the droid pilots instead, wondering if anyone had ever bothered to name them, and, if not, had they named themselves?

“You’ve read the same reports I have, Audrey.”

“You think any of that matters anymore? I mean, even if the
Gilgamesh
isn’t a toss case, you think we’re going to be measuring sections and collecting samples? If we’ve lost – ”

“We don’t know what we’ve lost.”

“We know we’ve lost Welles, and three crew members with him. We know Baird and Osmolska probably aren’t doing a lot of science these days.”

“We pick up the pieces. We do what we can do.”

“We try to stay alive,” I said, and he sighed and nodded his head.

“That, too.”

On the narrow flight deck below us, one of the droids made a sudden noise like an antique teletype, the sort you hear on the old news vids. I flinched, and Joakim put a hand on the left leg on my jumpsuit.

“Why would the Agency have sent us on a suicide mission?” he asked, but I had no idea how I was supposed to reply to that. I wasn’t even certain what he’d meant.

“They couldn’t have foreseen any of this,” I said.

“They lied to the rest of the world. It’s not unreasonable to think they may have lied to us, as well.”

I shook my head and watched as the pilot that had made the teletype noise opened its chest and began fiddling about with its pale, silicone innards.

“Why did they waste so much time and energy and money sending out another load of rock hounds?” he asked me. “If the mining operations on Piros really were abandoned five hundred years ago, and if the agency wants the tech, why not send engineers and mechanics?”

“I’m sure they will. “

“When, Audrey? When we’ve cleaned up some mess down there that they’re not even willing to tell us about?”

“I don’t think we’re in much shape to clean up anything.”

“So maybe they just want us to tell them what the fuck they’re dealing with. I mean, don’t you keep asking yourself why the aliens abandoned Piros in the first place? If the mineral survey reports are anything close to accurate, why aren’t they still there?”

“I don’t know. Because bad shit happens,” I replied, wishing he hadn’t started this, that he’d waited until we reached the
Gilgamesh
to begin asking the hard questions, wishing I had one or two of the answers he was looking for. “There could have been a war that ended the operations. Maybe they found a better source closer to home. We’re talking about an entire civilization. And shit happens to civilizations. There’s nothing mysterious about that. Didn’t you ever have an archaeology class?”

“No,” he said. “But, since you mention it, why didn’t they send archaeologists?”

“They did. Osmolska has an MA in archaeology.”

“If the reports are telling us the truth, the aliens seem to have left in one hell of a hurry, at least the ones who
could
leave.”

“Shit happens,” I said for a third time, and asked my chair to remove the safety restraints.

“You’re beginning to sound like a bloody parrot, you know that?”

“I’ve got hydro in ten,” I said, getting to my feet once the heavy somaform folds had released me. I tapped at the timepiece on my belt. “We can continue this afterwards, if you really think we should. Weren’t you Mr. Wait-and-See? Aren’t you the one always said all that claptrap about the
Aegis
was only a lot of spook stories?”